KEY POINTS:
It took me a while to realise why Ace Rentals' billboard caused so much fuss. The ad featured three images of road signs with place names beginning with the word "whaka" - Whakatane, Whakamaru, and Whakamoa - alongside the phrase, "visit any whaka".
The Maori Language Commission complained it was an offensive play on words so the rental company capitulated and removed the sign.
I thought offence was taken because Ace Rentals was deliberately misspelling "waka", comparing its vehicles to sturdy sea craft.
Commission spokesman Debra Jensen said it was not funny, and culturally offensive. "Whaka is not even a word," she said. "On its own it is grammatically incorrect."
She claimed the advertisement highlighted the "double standard" in advertising between Maori and English - "There are clearly sectors which do not value or respect the language."
"Who" is the word to use, sweetheart, when referring to humans, if you want to be grammatically correct. But no mind, we with English as our first language are powerless. We don't have a taxpayer-funded English Language Commission to jackboot over your life.
Because I don't have a potty mind I didn't realise the billboard deliberately used a homophone; say aloud "visit any whaka" and it sounds like "visit any f***er". In fact, for some iwi, "whaka" is not pronounced with an "eff", so perhaps they, like me, were also puzzled.
Yes it's crude. No it's not funny. Writing that word in Maori or English offends, but have we become so precious and sensitive we need a government agency to wash out offenders' mouths with soap and water? Isn't it more effective to treat the perpetrators like the 2-year-old who's discovered the thrill of shocking adults with newly discovered swear words - that is, ignore them?
Of course, the Maori Party had to wade into the debate, with co-leader Pita Sharples declaring the billboard an "abuse of a people, our history and our culture. . . thousands of our people have worked tirelessly to restore te rangatiratanga o te reo Maori, and I doubt they think it's very funny."
I doubt anyone thought it was funny, save the adolescents in the ad agency who dreamed it up, but surely te reo Maori is robust enough to withstand such a petty assault, if you could even call it that.
And does Sharples truly believe every single Maori is so feeble that his or her history and culture is abused by such a trifle? If so, he has less faith and pride in things Maori than many Pakeha have.
There might well be double standards at play here, but not the kind Jensen's talking about. The English language is abused every day, not just in advertising slogans and jingles, but in our schools, by the Ministry of Education and by the National Qualifications Authority which signs off on text-spelling in exams. The spelling standards of almost every New Zealander educated in the past three decades are atrocious.
So don't get me started on abuse of a language. I spent a good part of last year learning to speak and write te reo Maori. In the first lesson, the tutor said ignore those who laugh or criticise; it's important not to be frightened away from the language.
Sharples is right - it is a wonderful language, with rigorous syntax and beautiful melody of pronunciation. But I've got news for his ilk - they don't own the language. Many more Pakeha like me are learning Maori and I'm not going to be intimidated into tip-toeing around it like some sort of culturally sensitive landmine. He and his mates at the Maori Language Commission need to toughen up. Take a lesson from lovers of English who've had no choice but suffer as our language is mangled daily by ignorant television and radio reporters - "owers" for "hours", "ear-lifted" for "airlifted", "wow for well", as in Lisa Owen's exchanges with TVNZ's Wendy Petrie beginning, "Wow Wendy".
If the harmless usage of "whaka" is an abuse of people, culture and language, then to this writer of Jewish descent, who was christened after the Hebrew prophetess and judge, one of only five such women in the Bible, Debra Jensen's Hollywoodising of her name is yet another insult to Jewish people. Debra is not even a word, it's a play on indicative speech and underwear, as in "De bra is falling off". So here's a "whaka" for the Maori Language Commission and Maori Party: "whakama".
